Fred On Everything — Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed

Conversations With Lanc

Of The Which There Won't Be More

June 26, 2006

Ages ago, for reasons of parental misjudgement, I studied at a small college
in rural Virginia, Hampden-Sydney. While surprisingly rigorous, being resolutely
Southern and as yet untouched by the foolishness that now degrades schools,
H-S was also relentlessly preppy. The studentry tended to be vapid future bankers
in small towns and pre-meds who would go to the Medical College of Virginia
in Richmond. I loathed them, and they, me. At night, to escape, I walked wooded
roads under the stars to smell the honeysuckle and listen to what the insects
had to say.

One night I found Lanc’s store. Lanc—Lancaster Brown—was
an old black man, in his eighties I’d guess. At any rate he had gone to
France in a labor battalion in World War I and spoke of the beer gardens and
other wonders. He was pretty slow by the time I met him. His had been a long
life and not always an easy one.

The store was tiny, old, worn, and unpainted, with battered glass cases of
candy and bubble gum, unpainted plank floors and, in the back, a potbellied
stove that always had a fire of chilly evenings. The counter had a big jar of
pickled sausage, behind it a box of Moon Pies—the credentials of Southern
ruralhood. A Camels poster from about 1953 was tacked to the wall. From it a
full-lipped and busty honey-blonde in a cowboy hat smiled down at the world.

Lanc was alone that night, sitting on the old church pew across the back wall
that served as bench when company came. I asked for a coke. He got it for me.
He was not dark-skinned, more earth-colored, being about the shade of the dispirited
floppy hat he habitually wore. I think he was embarrassed by being bald as an
onion. With a freshman’s sense of anthropological exploration I made conversation.

My grandfather, retired then, had been professor of mathematics and dean at
the college. It proved a telling credential. As soon as he realized that I was
Dean Reed’s grandson, I became almost family. Like many people in the
region, Grandpa (as I always called him) didn’t like the racial situation,
though he didn’t know what to do about it. But when a local black woman
had needed extensive dental work, Grandpa had quietly paid for it. This was
not unknown to local blacks.

He wasn’t at all what would today be called a liberal. He had none of
the amour propre, too much respect for scholarship, and believed in
personal integrity. Worse, he read Latin. He just had a sense of what was right
and what wasn’t.

I soon got in the habit of dropping in on Lanc during my nocturnal tours of
inspection. He usually sat on a broken-down chair, I on the pew. Light, what
there was of it, came from a bare bulb hanging on a wire. On bitterly cold winter
nights the store was warn and smelled comfortably of wood smoke and I was glad
to be there. Lanc liked to roast apples or fry baloney on top of the stove.
I ate vinegary sausage.

I was then known as Ricky but, mysteriously, he always called me Mickey. I
supposed that oncoming deafness accounted for it. “Hey there, Mickey,”
he would say when I appeared, “You come on in, sit right down. Yes sir,
you sit right down.” He extended me credit and depended on me to keep
track of the amount. I was Dean Reed’s grandson. He knew I would never
short him. You can bet I didn’t.

We were a strange pair. I was very young, and knew nothing of life other than
the small towns of Virginia and Alabama and what I had read in books. Lanc had
grown up black in a countryside then more remote than it is now, a world with
different rules and different people and utterly another place. And then found
himself in Paris.

He would shake his head and smile bemusedly, as though still after so many
years trying to understand France. Why, the beer gardens there, why you could
go day or night—day or night—and the lights and
how the people were dressed, and the women. In his time a black man didn’t
talk about white women if he was wise, and Lanc didn’t much, even with
Dean Reed’s grandson. Still it dawned on me that he hadn’t always
been eighty years old, and that Paris wasn’t Atlanta.

I was very young.

I couldn’t talk to Lanc about much, I guess. The intricacies of differential
equations and ancient victories in the Saronic Gulf were beyond him. I wasn’t
sure how he had learned to read. None of this seemed to matter. We discussed
whatever we could, mostly Paris and the army and local lore. Occasionally blacks
within walking distance came in for bread or Spam. One night a high school girl
came and asked Lanc where Jimmy was.

“He out coon hunting,” said Lanc.

“Two-legged or four-legged kind?” she asked, then saw me and giggled
with embarrassment.

Things were not as Uncle Remus-ish as the evenings of fried baloney and Dr.
Pepper might make them sound. There was real anger and hostility toward whites,
but they knew better than to show it. One year I sublet a room from Ben Hairston,
a black teacher at the local school. (I really didn’t like preppy
snots.) Ben was in his mid-thirties, drove an old hearse he had picked up somewhere,
and had slightly screwed-up eyes from having accidentally gotten drunk wood
alcohol. He had lived all over the eastern seaboard and definitely qualified
as sophisticated.

Which may be why he misjudged things. One night he told me that he was going
to a party, and would I like to come? Sure. Shortly afterward we walked into
the basement of a house nearby, where a dozen people were dancing. It was instantly
obvious that I was not welcome. I think it surprised Ben more than it did me.
Five minutes later we were gone.

The years passed. In summer the fields and woods behind the store glowed with
fireflies, or lightning bugs as I will always believe they are properly called,
and frogs creaked in the marsh. From time to time came the qucksilver fluting
of a whippoorwill. Lanc was always be on his pew, frying his baloney. For a
while he seemed eternal, and the store a place not really in the surrounding
world. One year after graduation I went by and the store was closed, Lanc’s
house nearby locked. Dead, I suppose.

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